Anthropic announced a partnership with Accenture on independent evaluation of frontier AI, an early step toward the commitment made in CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” to embed evaluators within the company. The work will be led by Faculty, Accenture‘s specialist AI business, and will include evaluating and red-teaming models, conducting alignment assessments, and testing model safeguards. Accenture helps businesses and governments deploy AI across many industries, and Anthropic says its understanding of how enterprises use AI in practice will inform the safety approach brought to model evaluation. Anthropic and Accenture each expect to invest at least $1 billion in building capacity in this area over the next five years.

Embedded evaluation is new, and many operational details are still being worked out. Unlike today’s external evaluators, embedded evaluators will work inside AI companies with access comparable to an employee’s. That access lets them watch models take shape during training, follow the decisions governing how models are built and deployed, and speak directly to employees. From this vantage point, they can assess how a company operates, verify that it is keeping its safety commitments, and identify blind spots. They can also report incidents and give the public a more informed account of benefits and risks. Anthropic is explicit that independent embedded evaluators do not reduce its accountability but help make it more verifiable; model safety remains the company’s responsibility.

There are, as yet, no standards for what information embedded evaluators should have access to, or how they should report what they find, and no settled system for funding independent evaluation. Anthropic‘s long-term position, previously stated in its Advanced AI Framework in June, is that funding should come from pooled or government sources. Since neither exists today, the company plans to work with different evaluators under different funding arrangements. For now, Anthropic will fund Accenture‘s work directly, and is in dialogue with METR and other nonprofit evaluators to pilot elements of embedded evaluation using their own funding. Ultimately, the company believes frontier AI needs an ecosystem of evaluators operating with shared standards.

The partnership is non-exclusive: Anthropic will work with other evaluators to be announced in the coming weeks, and Accenture will work with other AI developers in similar capacities. Anthropic says it will continue training and releasing frontier models with independent evaluators working alongside, and expects the approach to evolve as the field matures. It is sharing these early efforts now so others can see the process, with more details to come as the work begins and additional evaluators are brought on.